Gottfried Honegger

Born in Zurich in 1917, Gottfried Honegger first trained through the practice of graphic design, photography and exhibition design. In 1938, he opened a graphic design studio with Warja Lavater. His stay in New York from 1958 to 1960 marked a turning point: through contact with the American art scene, he developed an independent artistic inquiry that would make him one of the major figures of Concrete art.

He subsequently settled in Paris and continued his work between France and Switzerland until his death in 2016.

His first “Tableaux-reliefs” bring barely protruding geometric forms to the surface beneath a monochrome skin. Light reveals their differences in texture and alters their perception according to the viewer’s position. Over the decades, Honegger revisited this idea in series, changed its scale and extended painting into space: panels, volumes, sculptures and interventions in architecture prolong the experience begun on the canvas.

In his works, the square, the circle and colour do not describe the external world; they become the very means by which an image is constructed.

This rigour leaves room for both surprise and sensitivity. Honegger combines rules of composition, repeated modules and an element of chance, sometimes determined by rolls of the dice. From 1970 onwards, he also experimented with computer-programmed drawing.

The result depends as much on the precision of his system as on the vibrations of a surface, the effects of light and the space the work shares with the public.

A collector and active advocate of art education, in 1990 he founded the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux with Sybil Albers. Their collection, donated to the French state, and the workshops intended for children extend his conviction that art can transform the way we look. The retrospective devoted to him by the Centre Pompidou in 2015 bears witness to the breadth of this trajectory, from the painting to public space.